On Flirting: The Meeting of Eyes and Ayes and Is: Part I–Theory

Dear CF,

So enjoyed your last few posts which–as it happens–coincide with what I wanted to write you about anyway: flirting. I’ve conducted a smallish experiment and am eager to share the results with you.

But first, let me agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of the sexes’ attitudes toward pizzle and cooch instrumentality. Yes! Having read figleaf a bit, you’ve no doubt noticed that one of his major pet peeves is the “No Sex Class”–not just a population but a whole system built around the self-evident truth that men always want sex and women never do. That what is in fact being transacted across a room when people make eyes at each other is a tricksy rhetoric by which a man convinces a woman to let him do something to her that she doesn’t particularly want done.

Returning for a moment to the question of sexual fantasy, I’m going to offer a slight corrective to figleaf’s lucid cultural critique: wrongheaded as it is, I think this might, in fact, be the biggest unacknowledged fetish in Western culture. The pretense that women don’t want sex (or some sort of contact) is a HUGE fantasy that fires the imaginations and loins of the lusty, and it has the benefit of being sufficiently widespread (heh) that it doesn’t need Craigslist postings or special outfits to be enacted in bar after bar the world over.

Read more of this post